Compression may be carried out to increase the amount of data that may be stored on a data storage device. Unlike movies, pictures or audio recording that may support lossy compression, user data must be retrievable in the same condition as it was stored. This means lossless compression. For many applications that are not particularly time-sensitive, a high degree of compression may be achieved, albeit at the expense of processing cycles, storage resources and time. For other applications, a faster compression is more important than a slower compression that may be somewhat better.